During a speech in the Council for International Relations in Washington, the Vice-president of the USA Richard (Dick) Cheney stated that he hoped the US public opinion and the international community would support a military campaign against Iraq if necessary.

“If it is necessary to perform an act of aggression, I hope that this obtains the support of the American people and the international community”(sic) he declared.

During his trip to the more moderate countries in the Middle East, in March, Cheney will raise questions regarding the issue of security in the Persian Gulf, a sign that the USA is to sound out the opinion of Iraq’s neighbours before it launches its all-out attack, possibly in May.

Israel has already been provided with an anti-missile shield and the US Special Forces and Israeli armed forces have been carrying out joint manoeuvres for some time. Iraq is certainly under the microscope of Washington and this time, it seems that the target is not to clip Saddam Hussein’s wings, but to remove him and his regime and replace it with one favourable to Washington, which will then have a stranglehold, indirectly, on some 86% of the world’s oil resources.

Cheney’s words leave no doubt: “Iraq is again the subject of great preoccupation…It not only has a rigorous programme to develop its own weapons of mass destruction but also has already used them”(sic).

One would remind Mr. Richard Cheney, also known as “Dick” that his country is the only one to have used weapons of mass destruction, namely the murderous nuclear attacks on civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the napalm attacks on Vietnamese civilians, in former times and more recently, the deployment of radioactive weaponry in Iraq (murdering some 500,000 children in a decade), also in Kosovo, large swathes of which are radioactive and finally, the illegal NATO raids on Yugoslavia in 1999, in which hundreds of civilians were murdered by strikes with military equipment.

In a word, Mr. Cheney’s country has been systematically involved in actions which perpetrate war crimes and crimes against humanity. What right the USA has to plan and carry out an attack on a sovereign government is open to challenge, unless the international community does its ostrich act, again. The history of international diplomacy is at an all-time, shameful low.